Young people are so sneaky. You take your eye off them for one moment as they’re posting to social media on their snazzy smartphones while sipping an overpriced latte that they’ve foolishly bought instead of saving for a house, and the next minute they’re all grown up and ruining your electoral chances. Yes, the millennials have got older. Who knew. Answer: anyone who understands that “millennial” means someone born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, as opposed to being shorthand for “silly person younger than me who has views I don’t like”, as it is often used. Depending on precisely where you draw your age brackets, the youngest millennials are now in their mid-20s, while the oldest are over ...

“Everyone knows everyone” is the first rule of the Labour Party. They know each other; they’re related to each other; they sleep with each other; they marry each other. From the local Constituency Labour Party (CLP) to the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) itself, kinship of one kind or another abounds. In a certain way, Labour is not unlike other specialist professions. After all, doctors’ children are 24 times more likely to become doctors than their peers, and while coffee-machine romance is on the slide, an appreciable number of people still meet their partners at work. But the interrelated nature of Labour’s politicians also represents something of an ideological dissonance: from its aim to banish such networks from public life. And interrelated they ...

Breaking news: young people don’t like the Conservative Party. That’s the story of a new report from the centre-right think tank Onward, called “Missing Millennials”. They found that millennials – which they define as aged 25-40 – back Labour over the Conservatives by two to one. Are there any positives? Rishi Sunak comes out well – relatively. The generation prefers Sunak to his party by 25 points (imperfectly measured by comparing those with a favourable view of Sunak to their intention to vote Conservative). The party’s brand is tarnished, therefore their best chance of closing that gap rests with promoting Sunak. This is yet more evidence that a presidential strategy, which puts the Prime Minister at the forefront of all party ...

It sounds like a simple question. Who should be able to vote in general elections in Britain? But the answer is mired in inconsistency and confusion. Consider for example two seemingly similar migrants to the UK. One comes from Windsor, Ontario in Canada, the other from just across the US border in Detroit, Michigan. Yet the Canadian citizen would be able to vote in a British general election without becoming a British national, whereas their American cousin could not. Or what about two people who have migrated between the UK and Spain? The British citizen moved ten years ago to Spain. They live, work and pay tax there, and have even become a local councillor. The other, a Spaniard, moved to the ...

This article contains spoilers for the fourth season of Succession. It has entered into received wisdom that the ursine and seductive performance of James Gandolfini in The Sopranos popularised the anti-hero on television, jumpstarting the golden age of prestige TV and shaping it in the show’s image. Audiences rooted for the antihero – Tony Soprano, Walter White of Breaking Bad, Don Draper of Mad Men, Omar Little of The Wire – in spite of their flawed behaviour. One of the many innovations of HBO’s Succession is the role of Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox in a performance that came to a shock conclusion in the most recent episode. In Logan Roy, Cox and Jesse Armstrong, the show's creator, made something different – television’s first truly irredeemable leading man. Where ...

The political truism of 2023 is that nothing works. With delayed trains, the cost-of-living crisis, strikes and the seemingly unending political chaos surrounding Downing Street, few deny that Britain is broken. What is spoken of less frequently is how people feel they too are broken, and what that means for Keir Starmer as he plots his course to power. A poll carried out by More in Common for the launch of the New Britain Project, a left-leaning think tank, underlines the scale of the challenge for the next government and, in grim news for Rishi Sunak, how both middle- and working-class people are uniting behind the prospect of change and reform. It might not be surprising that 58 per cent of the 2,000 ...

As expected, the statistics released by the Office for National Statistics today show net migration at record levels for a calendar year. But behind that headline, the numbers don’t support the narrative – shared by many within government, the Labour Party and the media – of a system that’s spiralling out of control. Notably, the widely publicised “estimate” from the Centre for Policy Studies, despite covering a very broad range (700,000 to 1 million) was a gross exaggeration. In future, journalists should treat such speculation with considerably more scepticism. And net migration is no longer rising. In the year to December 2022, it was down, not up, compared with the year ending September 2022, and was unchanged from the year to ...

Immigration to the UK hit a record high of 1,163,000 in 2022. Combined with emigration of 557,000, net migration to the country therefore stood at 606,000, the highest figure on record, according to the Office for National Statistics. How does that figure compare to other big European countries? Comprehensive figures for 2022 are not yet available for other European countries, so direct comparisons cannot yet be made. However, in 2021, the latest year for which more reliable data is available across the continent, net migration to the UK was significantly higher than in other big European countries. That year, net migration to the UK stood at 488,000, compared with around 329,000 in Germany and 161,000 in France, according to those countries’ statistics ...